AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Piety sits by the door
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Claim (verbatim)
Late medieval English households kept miscellany books — romances, recipes, bawdy tales, prayers, all sewn together. This conjecture claims those books have a systematic architecture of respectability: the first item is religious at a rate far above the book's overall religious content, because the opening leaves were the book's public face — the part a visitor, a spouse, or a confessor would see first — so compilers posted piety at the door and shelved the entertainment behind it. The miscellany has a facade, like a house. If this holds, medieval lay reading was structured by an etiquette of display we can measure, and the common inference from a devotional opening to a devout owner collapses.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across at least fifteen household miscellanies indexed in DIMEV and IMEP (including Findern CUL Ff.1.6, Ashmole 61, the Heege manuscript NLS Adv. 19.3.1, and Lincoln Cathedral 91), the probability that the first surviving original item is religious will be at least twice the proportion of religious items in the books' interiors; primary clause: that twofold opening-position enrichment, computed only on books whose openings are codicologically original.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: DIMEV and the Index of Middle English Prose item-order records, with codicological confirmation from the published facsimiles and catalogue descriptions of the named manuscripts.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched compilation order in household miscellanies. Miscellany studies discuss purposeful arrangement and pervasive religious content, but no positional analysis of first-item religiosity against overall content share was located.
Predictions
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